You might not want to live with Crayola-colored living room furniture, but you just might pine for primary colors in your great outdoors, as furnituremaker Wayne Cordrey found out when he took his hand-painted furniture to the Saturday Market in Hood River, Ore. He sold it all before the market opened. “Not being someone who needs to be hit over the head, I quickly made some more,” he says.
After metal artist Gilles Neuray worked with resin for the first time, it became a fundamental element in his work. “Five years ago, I was making a fish and I needed something for its eyes, so I made them out of resin,” says Neuray. “I was so happy with the way the material catches the light that I began to use resin more and more.”
Water drops. Tree roots. Antlers. Soap bubbles. Everything from organisms to human organs serves as inspirations for glass artists Andi Kovel and Justin Parker, the partners behind the Portland-based esque studio. “Esque is a suffix—as in picturesque or burlesque,” says Kovel. “We wanted a studio name that acknowledges that everything that surrounds us influences us.”
In Morgan Walker’s paintings, narrative is a key tool. “All of my paintings have stories that develop and change throughout the whole process of painting it,” he says. “When the painting is finally done, so is the story.”
When Wendy Dunder constructs one of her illuminated sculptures, the piece gives her direction. “The material tells you what you can do,” she says. “If you bend it too far, it’ll break. It’s a very Zenlike and meditative process.”
To make the legs of his tables black, furniture designer Ken Tomita uses sumi, Japanese calligraphy ink. He got the idea while studying architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. “We were given an assignment to come up with 10 different ways of making wood black,” he says. “I used the ink for one of them. I discovered that it has the right amount of gloss, and it’s a deep black. It’s like painting a void.”
When Katie Todd moved into a new house and needed something for the walls, she began painting abstract landscapes. “I like to think of them as splashes of color that give you something interesting to look at on your walls,” she says.
Growing up in Germany, Helga Winter never imagined becoming an artist of any kind, much less a woodturner. “When I was a child, I did a lot of knitting and crocheting, but it wasn’t considered art because it was practical,” she says. “When I left school, I worked as a doctor’s assistant.”
For Portland designer Michael Arras, his early experience with art gave no indication that he’d eventually decide to design furniture. “In school, I took art classes with everyone else,” he says. “But I didn’t have a real interest then. Mostly I doodled.”
To learn woodworking, furniture designer Richard Massey apprenticed to both his father and his grandfather. “I’m a fourth-generation woodworker,” he says. “It’s in my blood. I learned a tremendous amount from my grandfather, and not just about woodworking, but also about life. He was a wonderful person.”
